United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


A long-time friend of Mantell's went on record as saying that he'd flown with him several years and knew him personally. He couldn't conceive of Mantell's even thinking about disregarding his lack of oxygen. Mantell was one of the most cautious pilots he knew.

Among these are a bas-relief representing Vesta and Minerva crowning a young man ; a bas-relief of Jupiter and Juno; a bas-relief representing a sacrifice before an altar ; an imperfect bas-relief representing three goddesses ; a lion's head from the roof of the Parthenon ; a fragment from Mantell's collection, of a female figure found on the plains of Marathon ; the upper part of a female figure, in bas-relief, from Athens ; two women and a child making offerings found in Laconia ; another bas-relief from Laconia ; a curious subject in bas-relief from Athens, representing the upper part of a youth holding something, supposed to be a lantern, with a boy near him, and a cat on a column ; a cast from a tablet representing in bas-relief Pan seated on a rock with a draped nymph, supposed to be Echo, before him ; a cast of the tablet of Euthydia, daughter of Diogenes, who is taking leave of friends ; and lastly, a bas-relief representing the shape of a shield, on which the names of the ephebi of Athens, under Alcamenes, are inscribed.

"The only thing I can think," he commented, "was that he was after something that he believed to be more important than his life or his family." My next step was to try to find out what Mantell's wing men had seen or thought but this was a blind alley. All of this evidence was in the ruined portion of the microfilm, even their names were missing.

It arrived several days after my visit with Dr. Hynek. The report said that the F-51 had lost a wing due to excessive speed in a dive after Mantell had "blacked out" due to the lack of oxygen. Mantell's body had not burned, not disintegrated, and was not full of holes; the wreck was not radioactive, nor was it magnetized. One very important and pertinent question remained.

The magnificence of your last numbers, eight and nine, cannot be told. How admirably executed are your Macropoma, the Ophiopris procerus, Mantell's great beast, the minute details of the Dercetis, Psammodus,. . .the skeletons. . . There is nothing like it in all that we possess upon vertebrates.

. . .From Boston, March 6th, I had the honor to thank you for your letter of January 5th, and for your splendid present of your great work on fossil fishes livraison 1-22 received, with the plates. Bakewell's account of your visit to Mr. Mantell's museum. In Boston I made some little efforts in behalf of your work, and have the pleasure of naming as follows: Josiah Quincy, President.

In both instances when the aircraft began to climb, the sundog disappeared. This was because the angle of reflection changed as the airplane climbed several thousand feet. These sundog-caused UFO's also had fuzzy edges. I had always heard a lot of wild speculation about the condition of Mantell's crashed F-51, so I wired for a copy of the accident report.

"The hardest thing to manage was the death of 'Little Eva' with 'Uncle Tom' by the bedside, but managerial genius overcame the difficulty after the style of Mantell's 'Corsican Brothers. You see it is all easy enough when you know how. 'Little Eva' is discovered, sitting up in bed with the curtains drawn back. She says what she has to say to her father and the rest.

He took his viewers around the U.S., talked to Kenneth Arnold, of original UFO fame, by phone and got the story of Captain Mantell's death from a reporter "who was there." Sandwiched in between accounts of actual UFO sightings were the pro and con opinions of top Washington brass, scientists, and the man on the street.